Easy Decisions
by bobissa
Summary: He tells people it's like a switch.   Damon


DIsclaimer: Not mine.

Easy Decisions

He breathes as the steady flow becomes a drip, drip, drip, and inclines his head with a smile to listen to the footfall above. Stefan's up there pacing around his room, stomping out his guilt (which, come on, is massive in a way that borders on parody) or, more likely, rehearsing some romantic musical number he's planning on surprising Elena with at school tomorrow. The things that boy does for love.

He grins and looks down at his hand. The gaudy ring is heavy and cold – colder than the skin it's around – but it's been a part of him he's barely noticed in years, years that have made him colder and done nothing to stop him looking backwards. Like the woman it represents, the ring will be with him always, never able to be shaken off or discarded. He laughs now because it's funny and something she probably knew all along, and as much as he can lie to the world he cannot lie to himself as well; he is the brother who is the fool for love.

Stretching out lazily on the couch, he crosses his legs and puts his arms behind his head. Stefan must be up there learning to tap dance judging by the ruckus he's making. At least he seems to be staying in rhythm. He could never tell him, but it's nice to have his brother around again. It had been too long this time. Insults, a little good-natured blood-letting and arguing about moral dilemmas; it is so good to be home. Watching Stefan use his good guy powers to charm a pretty brunette with mischief in her eyes feels too much like old times. It's too ridiculously absurd to resist.

He is on the verge of sleep, his eyes closed and his mind bouncing around, being lulled by the beat of his brother's steps when the rhythm stops and he hears the shower come on. He rolls onto his side in a huff and absentmindedly wiggles his ring with two fingers. It's rare, but he has taken the ring off in the last hundred years. Never for very long though. Not for more than a few hours, at least not willingly. He smirks as he thinks that that's just another thing he has yet to pay his brother back for. It should be something petty. Vindictive in broad strokes isn't necessarily always more fun. Okay, it is, but he's kind of over it already. Maybe he should just go upstairs, sneak into Stefan's bathroom and flush the toilet while he's still in the shower. Nah, surely he can think of something a little more childish.

He sits up and leans over to rest his elbows on his knees. Wiping his hands over his face, he feels the cold metal of his ring rake over his eyebrow. The sudden urge to be rid of the thing leaves him staring at his hand stretched out in front of him. Before he knows what's happened, the ring is sitting on the coffee table next to his glass of bourbon. He can't take his eyes off of it.

He tells people it's just like a switch. Off: no pain, no rules, just looking for anything to excite the dullness of eternity. On: it's like the world is crashing in on you all at once, every good or bad thing that's ever happened to you running on a projector in your head like a faded, spotty home movie. But it's not as simple as that. It starts out as a decision. You wake up and you decide. Every day. And little by little, it becomes routine until it just is. No decision necessary. And it's easy. Terribly, seductively easy.

It doesn't go away just because you turn it off. It's still there, like the ring, waiting for you to stop ignoring it. And it comes out sometimes, decision or no. He's slipped up in the past. Like that time in Houston when he drained the woman who looked so much like their mother (crying over a corpse in an alley at 2 am rarely looks anything but shady), or when he stumbled upon that Civil war reenactment in Tennessee in '92 (Southerners have always been a fun and tragic mix of proud and bizarre). Switch flipped on all of its own accord. Nothing he could do about it.

And that's what he tells himself every day now. He doesn't like to think he's lost control, but just as off became the default setting without him knowing it, sometime after he returned to Mystic Falls he let himself drift on. The truly terrifying thing, the thing that he doesn't want to admit – and he's barely thinking about it now, he'll tell you that – is that he can't pinpoint when the change happened.

The ice in his bourbon, almost finished melting, shifts noisily and he finally takes his eyes off the ring. The water has stopped running upstairs, and whatever his brother is doing up there now, he's doing it silently. He snorts as he imagines Stefan writing in that girly little diary of his all about how he is a broken, sulkier Damon. He can see practically see the words on the page: "I'm worried about my brother. He's been so forlorn since the Tomb." The Tomb. That's probably when the change happened. Well, he hopes. Letting himself believe she was in there and that he would get a happy ending should have been his first clue, but if that's where this all began then his switch has been on for a while now, and he's just a single-minded asshole who, let's face it, knows how to have an awesome time while everyone else suffers.

He gulps down the bourbon in one tip of the glass and relishes the burn in his throat and the hiss that escapes his lips. Party while everyone else burns. He accepted that motto long before he turned. The minute he abandoned the Confederacy on principle only to forever lose the respect of his father was the amount of time it took him to realize that doing the right thing got you nowhere. Might as well just have a good time. Like Katherine did. Does, he supposes.

He thinks about pouring another drink, but he's interrupted by a soft whimper from the chair across from the couch.

"You're going to clean that up, right?" Stefan asks, appearing in the doorway. He's rolling up the sleeves of his shirt and somehow pulling off a look of both amusement and disapproval. People say Stefan has a stick up his ass (okay, _he_ says that), but the guy isn't always a buzzkill.

"Elena will be here in half an hour, and she may not be as understanding as me of your," and he makes a small circle with his pointing finger in the direction of the chair, "dinner arrangements." He looks over in time to see the pretty red head who's curled up in the chair open her eyes for a moment and smile at the trail of semi-dried blood on her arm.

"Don't worry about any little thing, brother. I have to get her back to the dorms soon anyway." He smirks and whispers conspiratorially, "Curfew." Standing, he circles the table to collect his ring and the glass of blood resting on the ground directly below the girl's dangling hand. The blood reeks of vodka, but what can you expect from a sorority girl? "Want some?" he offers Stefan.

"Thank you, but no." He shrugs as if to say "your loss" to his little brother and tips the glass back to drink deeply, adding a slurp and small moan for dramatic effect. When he's practically licked the glass clean, he sees the corners of Stefan's mouth turn up slightly before he turns and walks out of the room, throwing a "half an hour, Damon" over his shoulder.

It takes a few minutes to clean the girl up and wake her. She doesn't seem to know where she is once she starts mumbling and all he can answer for her is that she had a really good time at the party. She agrees by nodding her head and going pale. He swears under his breath and picks her up swiftly, hoping that if she pukes, she'll do it outside.

She does indeed puke, but mostly in the bushes off the driveway. She isn't steady on her feet, and as he holds her hair back he looks over the house and thinks it must have happened when he came back to town. Or maybe that first confrontation with Stefan. Hate can be just as powerful as love, and Stefan brings out both. He has to pause mid thought after he's loaded the girl in his car, buckled her seat belt, and pushed her hair away from her face.

He knows exactly when it happened, and smiles because he should have been disappointed at the time. Or at the very least a little angry. Instead he was fascinated and jealous and excited. Alive. The car gives a little and shakes under his weight as he leans against it and laughs.

He had let himself hope for a moment all those months ago, a moment he knew was foolish. But a look into her eyes told him she was something altogether different, and the words "I'm sorry, you lost her too" broke through enough that the next day he had a decision to make once more.

As he pulls out of the driveway, he stops himself from turning on the radio and letting the music drown out his increasingly thinky thoughts. Instead he spends the ride back to campus tapping the metal of his ring on the steering wheel and deciding whether he should curse Elena or thank her. By the time he walks the girl up to her room, he has decided he might just need to mull it over with another sorority girl - a blonde maybe - preferably one who likes whiskey this time.

End.


End file.
